In an Al-Monitor article published Dec. 22, my colleague, Iraqi journalist Shukur Khilkhal, wrote about the renewed discussion among Iraqi Muslims regarding the Jewish community and its contribution to Iraqi culture and society. He mentioned that the Baath Party, which ruled from 1968 to 2003, imposed a total ban on revisiting the issue of the Muslim majority’s attitude toward the Jewish community. It is only in the last decade that Iraqis have dared to cast a critical eye over the fate of the community that lived in their midst for some 2,500 years, until it was forced to flee in fright in the 1940s and ’50s.
Unlike the prevailing view in Israel, Iraq’s citizens do not place all the blame for the Jewish flight on the “subversive activities” of the Zionist movement. Historian Rashid al-Khayoun claims that several Arab religious figures played a central role in formulating a plan for the forced departure of some 150,000 Iraqi Jews.
